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But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their
teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours
binds the Soul down in it.
In other words: two people inhabit the one stately house; one of
them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but
none the less maintains his residence in it; the other makes no
complaint, asserts the entire competency of the Architect and
waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it, having no
further need of a house: the malcontent imagines himself to be
the wiser and to be the readier to leave because he has learned
to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and timber and
that the place falls far short of a true home; he does not see
that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with
necessity assuming that his conduct, his grumbling, does not
cover a secret admiration for the beauty of those same "stones."
As long as we have bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared
for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of
labourless creation.
Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to
address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such
raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the
Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is
true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that
have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of
a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling
the indwelling. of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this
means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside
pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to
disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock; there is
nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must
call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from
the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured
strength.
Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce
within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly
bodies: when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the
effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which
they also tend; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared
as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all
this training, for that state which is theirs by the Principle of
their Being.
This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to
themselves, but they are not any the nearer to vision by the
claim- or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for
ever to the ordering of the Heavens, can never stand outside the
material universe, they themselves have their freedom in their
death. This is a failure to grasp the very notion of "standing
outside," a failure to appreciate the mode in which the All-Soul
cares for the unensouled.
No: it is possible to go free of love for the body; to be
clean-living, to disregard death; to know the Highest and aim at
that other world; not to slander, as negligent in the quest,
others who are able for it and faithful to it; and not to err
with those that deny vital motion to the stars because to our
sense they stand still- the error which in another form leads
this school to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature, only because
they do not see the Star-Soul in outer manifestation.
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